Far Pavilions (3 page)

They had not succeeded in either task, for Hilary's reports were sent home by unorthodox routes. And though there were officials who regarded his proceedings with suspicion – in particular his close friendship with ‘a native’ – they lacked evidence. Suspicion was not proof. Hilary continued to move freely about India and took pains to impress upon his son that the greatest sin that man could commit was injustice, and that it must always be fought against, tooth and nail – even when there seemed to be no hope of winning.

‘Never forget that, Ashton. Whatever else you are, be just. “Do as you would be done by.” That means you must never be unfair.
Never
. Not under any circumstances. Not to anyone. Do you understand?’

Of course he did not, for he was as yet too young. But the lesson was repeated daily until gradually it became borne in upon him what the ‘Burra-Sahib’
*
(he never thought of his father by any other name) meant, for Uncle Akbar too would talk to him of this, telling him stories and quoting from the holy book to illustrate the theme that ‘A man is greater than Kings’; and that when he grew up and became a man he would find that this was true. Therefore he must try always to be just in all his dealings, because at this time there were many and terrible injustices being done in the land by men who held power and had become drunk with it.

‘Why do the people put up with it?’ demanded Hilary of Akbar Khan. ‘There are millions of them to a handful of the Company. Why don't they do something? – stand up for themselves?’

‘They will. One day,’ said Akbar Khan placidly.

‘Then the sooner the better,’ retorted Hilary, adding that, to be fair, there were any number of good Sahibs in the country: Lawrence, Nicholson and Burns; men like Mansel and Forbes, and young Randall in Lunjore, and a hundred others, and that it was ones in Simla and Calcutta who need weeding out – the pompous, greedy and pigheaded old gentlemen with one foot in the grave and heads that had become addled by sun and snobbery and an inflated sense of their own importance. As for the army, there was hardly a senior British officer in India under the age of seventy. ‘I am not,’ insisted Hilary ‘an unpatriotic man. But I cannot see anything admirable in stupidity, injustice and sheer incompetence in high places, and there is too much of all three in the present administration.’

‘I will not quarrel with you over that,’ said Akbar Khan. ‘But it will pass; and your children's children will forget the guilt and remember only the glory, while ours will remember the oppression and deny you the good. Yet there is much good.’

‘I know, I know.’ Hilary's smile was more than a little wry. ‘Perhaps I myself am a pompous and conceited old fool. And perhaps if these fools I complain of were French or Dutch or German I would not mind so much, because then I could say ‘what else can you expect?’ and feel superior. It is because they are men of my own race that I would have them all good.’

‘Only God is that,’ said Akbar Khan dryly. ‘We, his creatures, are all evil and imperfect, whatever the colour of our skins. But some of us strive for righteousness – and in that there is hope.’

Hilary wrote no more reports on the administrative activities of the EastIndia Company and the Governor-General and Council, but turned instead to those subjects that had always claimed the lion's share of his interest. The resulting manuscripts, unlike his coded reports, were dispatched through the normal channel of the mails, where they were opened and examined, and served to confirm the authorities in their opinion that Professor Pelham-Martyn was, after all, merely an erudite eccentric and entirely above suspicion.

Once again the camp struck its tents, and turning its back upon the palms and temples of the south, moved slowly northward. Ashton Hilary Akbar celebrated his fourth birthday in the capital of the Moguls, the walled city of Delhi, where Hilary had come to complete, correct and dispatch the manuscript of his latest, and last, book. Uncle Akbar marked the occasion by arraying Ash in the finest of Mussulman dress and taking him to pray at the Juma Masjid, the magnificent mosque that the Emperor Shah Jehan had built facing the walls of the
Lal Kila
, the great ‘Red Fort’ on the banks of the Jumna River.

The mosque had been crowded, for it was a Friday. So crowded that many people who had been unable to find places in the courtyard had climbed to the top of the gateway, and two had fallen because of the press and been killed. ‘It was ordained,’ said Uncle Akbar, and went on with his prayers. Ash had bowed, knelt and risen in imitation of the other worshippers, and afterwards Uncle Akbar had taught him Shah Jehan's prayer, the
Khutpa
, which begins ‘
Oh Lord! Do thou great honour to the faith of Islam, and to the professors of that faith, through the perpetual power and majesty of thy slave the Sultan, the son of the Sultan, the Emperor, the son of the Emperor, the Ruler of the two Continents and the Master of the two seas, the Warrior in the cause of God, the Emperor Abdul Muzaffar Shahabuddin Muhammad Shah Jahan Ghazi
…’

What, demanded Ash, was a sea? And why only two seas? – and who had ordained that those two people should fall off the gateway?

Sita had countered by dressing her foster-son as a Hindu and taking him to a temple in the city, where in exchange for a few coins a priest in yellow robes had marked his forehead with a small smear of red paste, and he had watched Daya Ram do
pujah
(worship) to an ancient, shapeless shaft of stone, the symbol of the God Shiva.

Akbar Khan had many friends in Delhi, and normally he would have wished to linger there. But this year he was aware of odd and uneasy undercurrents, and the conversation of his friends disturbed him. The city was full of strange rumours and there was a tension and an ominous sense of suppressed excitement in the narrow, noisy streets and crowded bazaars. It gave him a sharp feeling of apprehension and an awareness of impending evil.

‘There is some mischief afoot. One can smell it in the very air,’ said Akbar Khan. ‘It bodes no good for men of your blood, my friend, and I would not have our boy come to any harm. Let us go away from here, to somewhere where the air is cleaner. I do not like cities. They breed foulness as a dunghill breeds flies and maggots, and there is something breeding here that is worse than either.’

‘You mean revolt?’ said Hilary, undisturbed. ‘That is true of half India. And in my opinion the sooner it comes the better: we need an explosion to clear the air and blow those lethargic blockheads in Calcutta and Simla out of their complacency.’

‘True. But explosions can kill, and I would not have my boy pay for the errors of his countrymen.’

‘You mean
my
boy,’ corrected Hilary with a shade of asperity.

‘Ours, then. Though he is fonder of me than of you.’

‘Only because you spoil him.’

‘Not so. It is because I love him, and he knows it. He is the son of your body but of my heart; and I would not have him harmed when the storm breaks – as it will. Have you warned your English friends in the cantonment?’

Hilary said that he had done so many times, but that they did not want to believe it: and the trouble was that not only men in high places, the Members of Council in Calcutta and the civil servants in Simla, knew too little of the minds of those whom they governed, but many army officers were equally ignorant.

‘It was not so in the old days,’ said Akbar Khan regretfully. ‘But the generals are now old and fat and tired, and their officers are moved so frequently that they do not know the customs of their men, or notice that their sepoys are becoming restless. I do not like that tale from Barrackpore. It is true that only one sepoy rebelled, but when he shot down his officer and threatened to shoot the General-Sahib himself, his fellow sepoys watched in silence and did nothing to prevent it. Yet I think it was unwise to disband that regiment after they had hanged the offender, because now there are three hundred more masterless men to add to the disaffection of many others. Trouble will come of it, and I think very soon.’

‘I too. And when it does, my countrymen will be both shocked and enraged at such disloyalty and ingratitude. You will see.’

‘Perhaps – if we live through it,’ said Akbar Khan. ‘Wherefore I say, let us go to the hills.’

Hilary packed his boxes and left a number of them in the house of an acquaintance in the cantonment behind the Ridge. He had intended, before leaving Delhi, to write several letters that should have been written years ago. But once again he postponed doing so, for Akbar Khan was impatient to be gone and there would be plenty of time for such tedious business when they reached the peace and quiet of the hills. Besides, having neglected his correspondence for so long, a month or two would make no difference. Consoled by this thought, he shovelled a pile of unanswered letters, including half-a-dozen addressed to his late wife, into a cardboard box marked ‘Urgent’, and turned to more interesting tasks.

There is a book, published in the spring of 1856 (
Unfamiliar Dialects of Hindustan
, Vol. I, by Prof. H. F. Pelham-Martyn,
B.A., D.SC., F.R.G.S., F.S.A
., etc.), that is dedicated ‘
To the dear memory of my wife Isobel
’. The second volume of this work was not published until the autumn of the following year and bore a longer inscription: ‘
For Ashton Hilary Akbar, hoping it may arouse his interest in a subject that has given endless pleasure to the author – H.F.P-M
.’ But by that time both Hilary and Akbar Khan had been six months in their graves, and no one had troubled to inquire who Ashton Hilary Akbar might be.

The camp had moved northward in the direction of the Terai and the foothills of the Doon, and it was here, in early April when the temperature had begun to rise and the nights were no longer cool, that disaster overtook them.

A small party of pilgrims from Hardwar, who had been offered hospitality for a night, brought cholera with them. One of them died in the dark hour before dawn, and his companions fled, abandoning the body which was found by the servants the next morning. By evening three of Hilary's men had taken the disease, and so swiftly did the cholera do its ugly work that none lived to see the dawn. The camp succumbed to panic and many snatched their chattels and vanished, not waiting for their pay. And on the following day Akbar Khan had sickened.

‘Go away,’ whispered Akbar Khan to Hilary. ‘Take the boy and go quickly, lest you too die. Do not grieve for me. I am an old man and a cripple, wifeless and childless. Why should I fear to die? But you have the boy… and a son has need of a father.’

‘You have been a better father to him than I,’ said Hilary, holding his friend's hand.

Akbar Khan smiled. ‘That I know, for he has my heart, and I would have taught him – I would have taught him… It is too late. Leave quickly.’

‘There is nowhere to go,’ said Hilary. ‘How can one out-distance the black cholera? If we go it will go with us, and I have heard that more than a thousand are dying daily at Hardwar. We are better off here than in the towns, and soon you will be well – you are strong and will recover.’

But Akbar Khan had died.

Hilary wept for his friend as he had not wept for his wife. And when he had buried him he went to his tent where he wrote a letter to his brother in England and another to his lawyer, and enclosing both with certain other papers and daguerreotypes in his possession, made a small packet of the whole and wrapped it carefully in a square of oiled silk. That done and the packet sealed with wax, he picked up his pen again and began a third letter – that long-overdue letter to Isobel's brother, William Ashton, that he had meant to write years ago and somehow never written. But he had left it too late. The cholera that had killed his friend reached out a bony hand and touched him on the shoulder, and his pen faltered and fell to the floor.

An hour later, rousing himself from a bout of agony, Hilary folded the unfinished page and having slowly and painfully traced an address on it, called for his bearer, Karim Bux. But Karim Bux too was dying, and it was, at long last, Daya Ram's wife, Sita, who came hastening nervously through the dusk of the stricken camp, bringing a hurricane lamp and food for the ‘Burra-Sahib’. For the cook and his assistants had run away hours before.

The child had come with her, but when she saw how it was with his father she pushed him outside the reeking tent and would not let him enter.

‘That's right,’ gasped Hilary, approving the action. ‘You're a sensible woman – always said so. Look after him, Sita. Take him to his own people. Don't let him –’ He found that he could not finish the sentence and groping weakly for the single sheet of paper and the sealed packet, thrust it at her. ‘Money in that tin box – take it. That's right. Should be enough to get you to…’

Another convulsion shook him, and Sita, hiding money and papers in the folds of her sari, backed away, and grasping the child's hand hurried him to his own tent and put him to bed – for once, and to his indignation, without the songs and fairy tales that were the normal accompaniments of bedtime.

Hilary died that night, and by mid-afternoon on the following day the cholera had claimed four more lives. Among them, Daya Ram's. Those who remained – by now a mere handful – looted the empty tents of anything of value, and taking the horses and camels, fled southward into the Terai, leaving behind them the newly widowed Sita, for fear that she might have taken the infection from her dead husband, and with her the four-year-old orphan, Ash-Baba.

Years afterwards, when he had forgotten much else, Ash could still remember that night. The heat and the moonlight, the ugly sound of jackals and hyenas quarrelling and snarling within a stone's throw of the little tent where Sita crouched beside him, listening and trembling and patting his shoulder in a vain attempt to soothe his fears and send him to sleep. The flap and croak of gorged vultures roosting in the
sal
trees, the sickening stench of corruption and the dreadful, dragging sense of bewildered desolation at a situation that he could not understand and that no one had explained to him.